ABSTRACT
This approach enables us to analyze spatially situated practices, struggles and interactions of young Iranian musicians, taking into account the complexity of the lived experiences of individual participants to make sense of their scene of practice and understand how that scene comes into being. For observers using a phenomenological approach to social research, the varieties of these shifting performances of everyday life become much more apparent, allowing for new and rich ways of understanding cultural practices outside totalizing binaries and grand narratives, such as East/West, centre/periphery, base/superstructure, and so forth. My conversations with these artists highlighted a number of social and historical trends as contributing factors to the advancement of underground music in Iran. It narrowed these elements down to the following: (1) the liberalization of the Iranian cultural sector during the Reform years of the 1990s; (2) the backlash against the outdated Los Angeles-based Iranian music; and (3) advancements made in new information technologies.
